Melvin Lasky, who has died aged 84, was, as editor of the magazine Encounter from 1958 to 1990, and of Der Monat (the Month) for 15 years, a combatant in the struggle to keep western intellectuals in the United States' cold war camp.

But in 1967, it was disclosed that both Encounter and Der Monat had been covertly financed by the US Central Intelligence Agency and Mel's reputation shrivelled. But it was to be another 23 years before Encounter closed.

Mel had been an anti-Stalinist combatant long before it was fashionable. It was certainly no secret from me, having shared seven years of secondary and higher education with him in New York. Those surprised by the CIA's use of Trotskyists - and Mel had been one - forget the agency's cynical realists knew that the most dedicated enemies of the Communist party were those who hated it long before the cold war.

The leading CIA fingerman in the international trade union movement was Jay Lovestone, US Communist party general secretary before he turned anti-Stalinist. Encounter's first co-editor was our classmate Irving Kristol, known at college as a "Lovestonite".

If I could greet Mel with restrained warmth, being a neutral in the cold war to which he was so committed, it was because of our shared history. Mel was born near me in the central Bronx at Crotona Park, on whose frozen lake my mother taught me to skate. We both wound up in the huge new all-boys academic high school, De Witt Clinton, and then at the free College of the City of New York (open to the top tenth of New York's high school graduates.)

The 1500 students entering in 1935 endured the most turbulent four years, while swotting to get some of the few jobs going in the depression. Almost half of its students were the sons of Jewish immigrants who had left their families behind in Hitler's path. At that time, Mel seemed an intellectual Trotskyist, espousing the dissident anarcho-syndicalist POUM in the Spanish civil war. In his first autobiographical pamphlet, he describes himself as initially a social democrat, a term which did not have its contemporary meaning. In that time, within NYC's Russian-Jewish community it referred to the embittered remnants of the Russian party, which had been smashed by the Bolsheviks. Mel's origins in the anti-Communist Russian-Jewish community help explain why, at 22, he became literary editor of the New Leader, an organ of anti-Communist Jewish liberals. He held the post from 1942 to 1943. In 1944, Mel belatedly signed up, as a US Army combat historian in Europe.

Postwar, with the cold war, Der Monat was launched in Berlin in 1948 with Mel as editor, a job he did until 1958 and again from 1978 to 1983. His intellectual and linguistic abilities were never in question, and in 1958, as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament took off, Mel replaced Irving Kristol - co-editor since 1953 with poet Stephen Spender - on Encounter. At that time, many British intellectuals had clustered around Kingsley Martin's New Statesman, which tended towards a cold war neutrality. US government thinking was that if a Labour government were returned to power, dissident left-wing MPs would make it difficult for the US to retain Britain as a secure ally.

Encounter's function was to combat anti-Americanism by brainwashing the uncertain with pro-American articles. These were paid for at several times the rate paid by the New Statesman and offered British academics and intellectuals free US trips and expenses-paid lecture tours. There was no room for the objective-minded in this cold war to capture intellectuals.

Enormously industrious, Mel doubled up by running publishing houses for his masters. The premise was that they published pro-American books knowing that the bulk of each edition would be purchased by US agencies to donate to book-starved libraries in the third world.

Even at its peak Encounter had never claimed a circulation above 40,000. Its spider's web began to come apart in 1966-67 with publication of pieces in the New York Times and the radical magazine Ramparts. And Thomas Braden, previously a CIA divisional chief, confirmed in the Saturday Evening Post that, for more than 10 years, the CIA had subsidised Encounter through the Congress for Cultural Freedom - which it also funded - and that one of its staff was a CIA agent. (Lasky had been the CCF's sometime executive secretary). The magazine also covertly received British government money.

Mel's co-editor, Professor Frank Kermode, resigned, proclaiming he had been misled by Mel. "I was always reassured that there was no truth in the allegations about CIA funds."

Mel admitted breezily that "I probably should have told him all the painful details." Spender also quit the monthly and many contributors pulled out.

The CIA funds, had, in fact been replaced in 1964 by Cecil King's International Publishing Corporation - the then owners of the Daily Mirror - which bought the magazine. King's deputy, Hugh Cudlipp, sprang to Mel's defence, insisting that "Encounter without him [Mel] would be as interesting as Hamlet without the Prince".

Encounter staggered on, while control in 1974 passed from IPC to the Carus Corporation. Mel remained its editor until 1990, Conrad Black provided some capital but the magazine folded in 1991. Lasky spent more time in Berlin than in his Chelsea home.

In those days when we shared an education together amidst the political turbulence of 1930s New York, Mel appeared as a very vocal poseur, anxious to become a fashionable critic like Edmund Wilson. When, much later, we occasionally bumped into each other at Gatwick airport, when I was returning from holidays and he was off to his main home in Berlin, I saw he had grown thinner on top and thicker about the middle, but what never altered was his sardonic half-sneer and nasal whine.

His books include Africa For Beginners (1968), Utopia And Revolution (1977), and The Use And Abuse Of Sovietology (1988). His autobiography, On The Barricades And Off, was published in 1989. He and his wife, Brigitte Newiger, were divorced in 1974. His partner Helga Hegewisch survives him, as do his son and daughter by his marriage.